ARCHITECTURE VIEW

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; Even Chicago Is Not Immune To Fashion

By Paul Goldberger

Published: September 11, 1988

CHICAGO—
For more than a decade now this city in which architecture is a subject of everyday conversation has been in a kind of identity crisis. Chicago has always prided itself on being America's great city of modern architecture - the city in which the average person knew who Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe were and the average real-estate developer was expected as a matter of course to put up first-class modern buildings. No New York flash and glitz for Chicago. But in the mid-1970's the Chicago gospel began to look a bit shaky. Not only was Mies van der Rohe's austere, steel-and-glass modernism less and less the order of the day everywhere, but worse still, a few revisionist scholars were beginning to point out that Chicago's true architectural past was a lot less purely modernist and a lot more eccentric than the history books would have had us believe.

What was the city in which Mies was revered as an architectural deity to do? A few of its architects struggled, lamely, to ignore the tide, but most came to accept the all too obvious truth - that modernism as practiced by Mies, for all the greatness of its legacy to Chicago, was at bottom just one of many ways of making architecture, and not really the ultimate truth that so many Chicagoans had spent the 1950's and 1960's believing it to be.

Gradually Chicago's architecture evolved, and now, at the end of the 1980's, a striking truth has become evident: the post-modern style, which substituted traditional ornament and picturesqueness for modernist austerity and which was looked on with horror by the keepers of Chicago's modernist architectural flame just a few years ago, has now become so common in Chicago that it is fair to say that there are probably more post-modern buildings here than in almost any major downtown in America. Chicago in the last few years has embraced post-modernism with such fervor that the style has become, for better or for worse, the city's new vernacular.

Some of the new Chicago buildings are the work of out-of-town architects, like Philip Johnson and John Burgee and the firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox, all of New York. Others, however, are home grown; several are by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the vast, Chicago-based firm that for nearly half a century served as America's most prestigious purveyor of sleek, corporate-style modernism. Skidmore's architects had been putting cornices and moldings onto their buildings in other cities, most notably Washington, for several years, but it was only quite recently that they began to do the same thing in Chicago. Now, however, there seems nary a modernist design coming out of Skidmore's Chicago office: older partners who worked closely with Mies van der Rohe have mostly died or retired, and the transformation seems nearly complete.

The buildings themselves are uneven in quality. Taken together, of course, they suggest that Chicago architects (and the real-estate developers who are their clients) are not so immune to the currents of fashion as they would always have had us believe. But the best of the new generation of buildings here are good enough to stand on their own terms, however much fashion may have been the initial motivation. And they serve, as a group, to focus architectural attention on Chicago once again - admittedly with a certain irony, given that these buildings represent an approach to design at odds with so much of what the city has always professed to stand for.

The most compelling of the new buildings is surely 190 South LaSalle Street, the only work in Chicago by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. This is a 42-story tower that epitomizes Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee's lush, extravagant architecture of the 1980's. It is based loosely on Burnham & Root's Masonic Temple, a gabled skyscraper of 1892 that was an icon of turn-of-the-century Chicago.

But where the Masonic Temple was a strong, lean building, full of the blunt energy that marked Chicago's early modernist years, 190 South LaSalle Street is a building that emanates prosperity and self-satisfaction. Burnham & Root were building for a city that was desperately eager to assert itself; Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee were treating Chicago as if it had long ago arrived, and perhaps even become somewhat smug. They have not so much nostalgically recalled the Masonic Temple as they have re-created it in altogether different form - as if they had built a log cabin out of mahogany and given it bronze door knockers.

The new building is grander than Burnham & Root's in every way. It is sheathed in pink granite, and its gabled roofs are covered in copper and surmounted with ornate decoration; the building has a base of dark red granite with monumental entry arches. The ground-floor space is part lobby, part Renaissance chapel: it is a lavish room of red and white marble that has a 55-foot-high gold-leafed vaulted ceiling, huge iron chandeliers, and rounded apses. More than any office building of recent years this tower bespeaks a sense of luxury, not to say excess.

The amazing thing about this building is the extent to which it manages to be likable, even inviting, for all its grandiosity. The building has a kind of benign pomposity to it, a friendly swagger. It is not an intellectually challenging building by any means, but it does manage to capture that precise balance of arrogance and warmth, of ambition and sentimentality, that marked the best buildings of the 1920's. Of all the many post-modern skyscrapers that have tried to allude to the great eclectic skyscrapers of the 20's and 30's, this is one of the few anywhere that actually manage to give us some of the richness, the generosity of space, the sense of solidity, and the sense of connection with the rest of the city that marked the best older buildings.

Where the building fails, oddly enough, is not in its grandiose gestures but in simpler, more basic elements. The proportions from the outside are somewhat bulbous and ungainly, and the base of dark red granite seems disconnected from the shaft and top of pink granite, as if the building had been plopped onto an old bottom. And the midsection seems dull compared to the active top and bottom, though it is better, surely, than the midsection of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee's American Telephone & Telegraph Company building in New York, a less refined ancestor of this design. While the great arches and stone base of 190 South LaSalle Street do work splendidly to provide a sense of grandeur, even nobility, to the streetscape, they are not enough to overcome the sense that the building is still an object unto itself more than it is an element integrated into the larger cityscape.

This, of course, is the problem with so much of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee's recent work. For all that they delve into history to give their new buildings form, and for all that they claim to be ''relating'' to Chicago by modeling their building after the Masonic Temple, their priority is still the free-standing object, not the building that emerges out of its context.

More successful in that regard are some of Chicago's other new post-modern buildings, particularly a pair of smaller ones by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The better of these is a 26-story granite tower at 303 West Madison Street, a building that manages to avoid several of the traps that the Johnson and Burgee building did not: it is visually lively from top to bottom, yet its base, midsection and top fit comfortably together into a coherent whole.

This building, the work of Joseph A. Gonzalez, a Skidmore partner, presents a dignified yet vibrant presence to the street, and it invokes Chicago's past symbolically rather than literally in the form of windows that inventively elaborate on the traditional three-part ''Chicago window'' of the city's early skyscrapers. The building is a reminder that the art of designing small towers to fit into the cityscape really is an art of composition, a struggle to balance visual interest with coherence; this building does not present itself as a foreground object, active though its facade is.

Similar, but not quite as good, is 225 West Washington Street, another small, tightly sited ''infill'' building, this one the work of Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Here, too, there are variations on the Chicago window, but the building is compromised by a few pretentious details, like the arch at its base and the round dormer windows on the top. Mr. Smith looks as if he has been more successful, compositionally at least, in a much larger project, the A.T.& T. Corporate Center, still under construction at the corner of Monroe and Franklin Streets.

This massive, 60-story tower of granite is a handsomely massed, almost sumptuous mountain of stepped-back forms, its shape loosely calling to mind two of Chicago's greatest towers, the Board of Trade building on LaSalle Street and Eliel Saarinen's unbuilt project for the Chicago Tribune. The details of the facade of this building do not, at this point in mid-construction, look to be nearly as refined as in the smaller buildings, and this may compromise the A.T.& T. tower considerably. We will know when it is complete next year.

Just a couple of blocks away from these towers is 123 North Wacker Drive, designed by Ralph E. Johnson of the firm of Perkins & Will. Here, alas, post-modernism seems to have descended to utter cliche; this 30-story building with a pyramidal top tries to do all the same things as the others, but it comes off as harsh, even clunky, its facade less a graceful composition than a clashing mix of punched-out windows and glass curtain wall.

This building stands as a clear, not to say an urgent, reminder that for all we talk of architecture in terms of theory, it is ultimately an art of composition, and when there is no subtlety or grace to the composition, to the proportions, to the mix of colors and materials and textures, then a building fails as an esthetic object.

These towers mark only the beginning. If the avant-garde of architecture has begun, already, to move away from post-modernism, Chicago's builders have no interest in laying down the flag that they only just took up, and the next couple of years will see a great many more post-modern towers reach completion in this city.

Among the more promising is 900 North Michigan Avenue by Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York firm that may well have done more than any other architects to make post-modernism a commercially viable style around the country; this will be a 66-story granite tower with a mix of shopping, offices, hotel and apartments. Like most of Kohn Pedersen Fox's architecture, this skyscraper is well detailed, but ultimately compromised by the near-impossibility of mixing 1980's gigantism with 1920's classicism.

Photo of Johnson and Burgee's 42-story tower at 190 South LaSalle Street